Neil Patrick Harris has an easygoing vibe and a quick wit, and it’s just as well. As host of Sunday’s 65th Primetime Emmy Awards, he’ll be expected to keep things moving along during a show that has a reputation for being slow, unwieldy and, at times, downright amateurish.

It’s one of TV’s great imponderables: How a medium that relies so much on awards shows for ratings can put on such a lame show when it comes to recognizing their own. It’s partly the dizzying number of categories, partly the three-hour-plus running time, and partly the fact that hardly anyone watching the Emmys has seen any of the nominated films and shows.

Neil Patrick Harris

A good host can make a difference, though — even if diehard TV watchers will have to wait until late into the evening before learning whether Modern Family will continue its Emmy streak, or whether Breaking Bad will finally break into a drama club reserved in recent years for the likes of four-time winner Mad Men and last year’s winner Homeland.

The host has just a few shorts minutes to make an impression between the distribution of awards, but few those short minutes can go a long way.

And while Harris didn’t exactly set the Emmys on fire the last time he hosted TV’s biggest night, four years ago, he proved that one host who knows what he’s doing is better than five hosts who don’t. Harris followed a year in which the Emmys experimented with a quartet of reality TV hosts, who worked without a script on the theory that Jeff Probst, Ryan Seacrest, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel and Tom Bergeron would be able to make things up as they go along.

As so often happens with live television, it didn’t go exactly as planned.

So Harris is back, a throwback to the old-school style of hosting, with its school rules: Be funny, stay classy and move things along. Emmy producer Ken Ehrlich didn’t reveal any spoilers when he met reporters last month in Los Angeles, but he did say Emmy watchers can expect to see a little song-and-dance from this year’s host.

Ehrlich admitted the traditional In Memoriam segment presents added complications this year, because a number of luminaries who died this year did so before their time. Ehrlich confirmed there would be separate tributes for Cory Monteith, James Gandolfini, Jean Stapleton, Jonathan Winters and writer-producer Gary David Goldberg — a decision which, in Monteith’s case, has flared into controversy. Some have questioned whether Monteith deserves a separate eulogy, over and above the In Memoriam segment. They wonder whether Monteith, who appeared in just three seasons of Glee, warrants more attention than someone like longtime Dallas star Larry Hagman, who died in November and will be mentioned only briefly in the In Memoriam montage.

Cory Monteith, left, in Glee

The question of what’s appropriate and inappropriate, when it comes to memorial tributes, is uncomfortable and a little unseemly. This is where Harris will shine brightest. If his long experience of hosting the Tonys is anything to go by, he will introduce the In Memoriam segment and separate tributes with the class, dignity and sensitivity one has come to expect from a true master of awards ceremonies.

The 65th Primetime Emmy Awards may yet prove to be as unfocused and unwieldy as any other recent Emmy telecast, but at least this time Emmy watchers won’t have to worry about the host. (Sunday, CTV, CBS, 8 ET/5 PT)

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The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that tore through wide swaths of Indonesia and washed over low-lying coastlines from Thailand to Somalia has been recounted in innumerable dramatized films and TV programs, most recently in J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, which featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Naomi Watts.

Fictionalized dramatizations help put a human face on tragedies we otherwise might not know about, or else see in all-too-brief, emotionally detached accounts on the nightly news. As Saturday’s Passionate Eye documentary special Tsunami: Caught on Camera shows, though, the nightly news can only do so much in capturing the scale and disruption to lives caused by natural disasters.

The 2004 undersea earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed more than 200,000 people — the true number may never be known — and coincided with the new digital age of cellphone cameras and portable, hand-held video cams. By the time of the 2007 London terror attacks, consumer technology had advanced to the point where everyday people could record every event they witnessed, live as it happened, in digital-quality video.

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Tsunami: Caught on Camera

If the September 2001 New York City terror attacks were the most recorded and photographed news event in human history, personal footage of the 2004 tsunami — on a faraway continent, far removed from the world’s media centres — was even more remarkable. Fictional films like The Impossible and the HBO miniseries Tsunami: The Aftermath were based on first-person accounts of the survivors, but Tsunami: Caught on Camera brings those accounts to life as they happened, through the eyes and ears of those who were there.

U.K. company Darlow Smithson Productions, maker of the programs Hawking, How to Build a Bionic Man and Richard III: The King in the Car Park, among others, has combined jittery video, audio recordings and hurried snapshots into a minute-by-minute account of what happened. Tales of survival and the human will to live never seemed more urgent, or real.

Tsunami: Caught on Camera is not disaster porn. There’s no maudlin music, no hectoring voice-over, no preaching from the bully pulpit or talking heads only too happy to share their expert opinion from the hallowed halls of academia. Caught on Camera is a style of documentary filmmaking that has gone out of fashion — simple, bare-bones, by-the-book, first-hand accounts, delivered in halting, shaken voices, with none of the subjective point-of-view so many of today’s documentarians — and critics — confuse with art.

Caught on Camera sticks to English-speaking accounts, for the most part. And while that might not sound particularly inclusive — the hardest hit area, after all, was Banda Aceh in Sumatra; the local language Aceh is spoken by nearly four million people — the result is raw, visceral and real. Well worth watching. (Saturday, CBC News Network, 10 ET/7 PT)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile